By Simon Shinerock
Utter contentment, they were the only words Virginia Smith could think of to describe her feelings. Never in her twenty seven years could she remember experiencing anything like it. However, gradually, as the euphoria started to recede and full consciousness began elbowing its way through her wakening mind, Virginia started to panic. At first she became aware of a vague pressure somewhere in her head, an ominous pressure which was slowly but inexorably building, a pressure that started whispering to Virginia that something was not right, no, worse than that, something was terribly wrong.
At first the panic threatened to overwhelm her, it became caught in her throat, paralyzing her breathing reflex, realizing she could not breathe Virginia fought for breath, willing the familiar rise and fall of her lungs but it was no good, she was going to suffocate. Little by little though, the panic started to ebb away, Virginia, realising that panic was not working recalled the old Chinese proverb, ‘when crash inevitable, sit back and enjoy’. On the plus side, she was experiencing no pain, other than the self inflicted pain brought about by her own fear. She started to look for answers and began to speculate on how she came to be dying in this way, (because she had decided that she must be dying). She remembered her mum telling her about some kind of genetic heart defect that saw off Uncle Tom at a youngish age, or was he that young? No, Tom was 87 when he died but nevertheless, she was sure his heart gave out, so it still seemed relevant.
Then she began considering the time it would take for her to expire, it seemed like she had stopped breathing about three minutes ago and she knew that a person couldn’t survive much longer than that without air, so it would all be over quite soon. Wistfully she started to think about Will, her boyfriend, and then randomly, Trig her pet hamster, except Trig had himself expired 23 years earlier when she was four years old. Just as a feeling of calm had more or less asserted itself, she had another morbid thought, perhaps she was already dead? Yes, that had to be it, she was dead; after all, she couldn’t breathe, in fact she had no impulse to breathe whatsoever, added to which she couldn’t open her eyes either which meant she had to be dead.
Then another thought dawned, what if she was in limbo? Suspended between life and death, her eternal fate being considered by higher powers, clearly it was not a black and white heaven or hell decision, because it was taking so long. So Limbo it was, come to think of it she did feel very floaty, as if she were suspended in a calm sea, waving backwards and forwards with the warm gentle eddies. She started to wonder how long the deliberations would take, it seemed like another twenty or so minutes had slipped by and she was starting to feel a little bit impatient, her apprehension turning to irritation, the practical side of her nature trying to take command. If these higher powers were so omnipotent, it shouldn’t take them so long to make up their minds should it? Why couldn’t they just get on with it and put her out of her misery, if she was going to heaven she wanted to go there now and if it was hell, well then the sooner she got used to the idea the better.
Virginia was abruptly taken out of her metaphysical reverie by a new sensation which began to nag at the corners of her consciousness. Until now, she had believed that her eyes were closed. This was a logical deduction because she could see nothing and appeared to have no ability to open her eyes. Her mistake was becoming obvious as a startling variety of colours and images began to emerge out of the gloom. She tried to speculate on the cause of these new phenomena, dismissing the afterlife theory at least for a moment. Could it be that she had experienced a stroke or a brain haemorrhage? It seemed quite plausible; after all, such a brain injury would explain just about all the symptoms she had been having. She decided that she was probably in a hospital somewhere linked up to a life support machine, or, even worse on an operating table undergoing emergency surgery. She had heard about cases like hers where the patient regains consciousness during the operation but can’t say anything to alert the doctors to the fact. Then with horror she remembered reading a book called ‘the Diving Bell and the Butterfly’ where the poor author was left in a totally inactive state with the exception of having the ability to blink one eye. The thought of spending the rest of her life in a chair blinking one eye to communicate changed in Virginia’s mind from a possibility, to a virtual certainty in the blink of an eye. She felt the panic starting to rise again and if she had have been able to breathe she would have been hyperventilating.
Her surroundings were however oblivious to Virginias emotional fragility and even as she rehearsed her imaginary doom, colours became clearer and strange shapes and structures started to hove into view. The horizon was dominated by a rich pulsating red, its surface mottled and flecked with patches of light and areas of dark shadow. For the first time, Victoria started to feel as if she had become a part of some kind of alien landscape. She suddenly realised that in some strange way she actually was a part of the ebb and flow that flashed ever brighter at the forefront of her mind and that in a way she could not fully understand, she was being absorbed by it. Virginia had always prided herself in being an individual, someone who you couldn’t pigeon hole, a little quirky even. Yet here she was; no more that an hour into this new dimension to her experience and her individuality was melting away like a choc ice on a hot summer’s day. Soon she felt like there would be nothing left of the old her, nothing except her inner core, wiped clean.
Just as she was drifting past the point on no return, she felt oddly relieved, relieved of all the cares and responsibilities of her life. In that final moment between existence and non existence she experienced an amazing moment of clarity. The folly of her previous life was made clear and the solution to all life’s problems was laid before her. She felt herself nodding inwardly with approval, her fading inner voice whispering ‘I see now’. But as she tumbled over the cosmic falls which would take her to oblivion, the peaceful acceptance of her fate was shattered by an equally powerful but far more violent force. The whole of her universe shuddered to its core. There was no other way to describe what was happening, it was like an earthquake but so much more than an earthquake. Earthquakes only reform the land and the ocean, they leave the sky and the heavens untouched. What was happening to Victoria was far more than a local event, it was a universal shifting of perspective, a transition into another dimension and the transition looked like it was going to be a traumatic one.
The one good thing about this new drama was that it shocked Victoria back to herself; it somehow triggered a deeply buried survival instinct which took hold of what was left of her mind and asserted her right to retain her individuality no matter what the cost. It was as if Victoria had taken her first hit of Crack and followed it with a Crystal Meth chaser. Her senses, sharpened, every muscle in her body tightened, assuming that is that she still had a body, an issue she felt was still open to question.
Then there were noises, there could be no mistake, she could hear noises. The sudden presence of these noises revealed how quickly the absence of sound had become normal to her. What’s more, these noises sounded disjointed, grating, irritating. Victoria wanted to flick them away like an irritatingly persistent fly but she had nothing she could use to swat them with. The noises were not in sync with anything else, there was no rhythm to them, they did not belong to her new universe and immediately she associated them with its imminent destruction. As the violence of the cataclysmic disturbance subsided though, the noises remained but now they were changing, morphing into something familiar yet almost forgotten.
‘That’s good’. The phrase brought her up short, startling her out of survival mode, there could be no mistake, she clearly heard the words emerge from the midst of the annoying noises. Worse, there were other words and phrases coming through as the seemingly random static turned into a language she once used without thinking. And then the penny finally dropped, she had gone insane, and was currently in an insane asylum undergoing ECT.
The thought made her half remembered flesh crawl, she had once seen a documentary about mental asylums and the way they treated patients. She imagined herself tied down, strapped to an infernal machine, her eyes covered, her mouth bandaged shut, undergoing God knows what experiments in the name of progress and medical science. Then, there was another rip in the fabric of space and time, this time though it was far more powerful than before, it felt as if she was being torn apart atom by atom, her own personal big bang, heralding the beginning of a new universe.
‘That’s it Mrs Smith, you’ve done great, its all over now, you can relax, nurse, give Mrs smith her new baby, there you are it’s a beautiful baby girl, any ideas on what you want to call her’?
‘Yes doctor, her name is Virginia’.
The End
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